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As the Lucas Fire tore through Mendocino and Lake Counties, two portable fire hydrants sprouted from Lake County’s Keeling Park, pumping water directly from Clear Lake.
It was the first test of a homegrown solution to a problem the state is only beginning to reckon with: water systems never built to fight climate-fueled wildfire, with no specific guidance, mandate or funding to adapt.
Wildfires have burned roughly two-thirds of rugged, remote Lake County in less than 15 years — straining already overburdened water systems. So when lightning struck and the Lucas Fire sparked, Chief Shannon Banks of the Northshore Fire Protection District called local water companies to set up the new hydrants.
“We always in the past have looked for alternative water sources,” Banks said. “These pumps just make it a lot easier.”
When water can’t fight fire
Nearly two years ago, as flames from the catastrophic Eaton and Palisades fires devoured Los Angeles County communities, everyone from wealthy developer Rick Caruso to then-President-elect Donald Trump wanted to know: where was the water?
The questions fueled a cycle of misinformation and blame. Gov. Gavin Newsom called for an investigation and directed state water and fire officials to “identify measures that local governments can implement to provide adequate water supply for emergency response.”
The report that dropped last November concluded Los Angeles’ water supplies were robust but local water systems aren’t designed to suppress “firestorm conditions impacting an entire neighborhood of homes at the same time.”
Nearly a year later, though, state agencies haven’t issued specific recommendations or guidance beyond the basics.
“There’s no rules, there’s no guidelines or best practices that are out there — much less a clear delineation of responsibilities,” said Gregory Pierce, director of the UCLA Water Resources Group.
Pierce urged the state to start collecting information that could inform guidance or best practices. “I don’t want a rush to just create draconian standards (so) the Legislature can high five themselves.”
The gap has left local fire services and water suppliers on their own to figure out how to fight the growing threat of wildfires in their own communities.
Willie Sapeta, fire chief of the Lake County Fire Protection District, knows the challenge firsthand.
Sapeta led a strike team deployed to Altadena last January, when the Eaton Fire killed 19 people, injured firefighters and razed entire neighborhoods.
“Eaton Fire rocked me a little bit,” Sapeta said. “I’m in downtown Altadena, and I have no water. So we pulled from swimming pools. But the turnaround time for getting domestic water was about 45 minutes to an hour with a water tender.”
That, he said, cemented his decision to find a new strategy for Lake County. “It was really after the Park and the Eaton Fire that it really came to light. It’s like, how prepared are we?”
A water and fire alliance
The portable hydrants come out of an alliance Sapeta built absent state guidance or funding.
Sapeta grew up in Lake County, started working as a volunteer firefighter in high school, maintained hydrants and knows the local contractors who run water tenders. When he became fire chief, he found himself coordinating an effort to run hoses from one water system to refill another that was hemorrhaging water during wildfire.
Sapeta remembers the homes and buildings destroyed in each fire he’s fought — roughly 3,200 countywide from 2012 through 2024.
“Every house has a name and a face to it,” said Sapeta, tall and soft-spoken.
As the fire count mounted, the water companies in Sapeta’s district began meeting more frequently with his firefighters, crafting plans to keep their storage tanks filled and staff on-call during red flag days, when the air itself feels ready to ignite. The coalition plumbed raw water hydrants and built connections between their separate systems.
Other water suppliers and fire agencies joined in, expanding the alliance across the county. But the fires kept coming, and as they grew, Sapeta worried that though his district had prepared, his county still wasn’t ready.
In 2024, Sapeta deployed to the foothills north of Chico during the Park Fire, which burned nearly 430,000 acres. For weeks, firefighters Sapeta supervised used portable tanks and water tenders and pumped from a creek to fight the flames.
Then, in January 2025, came Eaton and Palisades.
In the Northshore district, Banks saw the same conversation play out after the Los Angeles fires
“People got scared, and the public started asking questions … Who’s maintaining this? And who’s responsible for that? A lot of the questions are hard to answer, because the laws are vague.”
Who’s responsible?
California’s towns and cities built their water supplies generations ago to supply houses and businesses.
The state has fire codes, flow requirements and emergency water standards. But these are aimed at putting out structure fires and ensuring water access for firefighters in remote parcels and subdivisions — not fighting climate-fueled conflagrations in neighborhoods.
Lawmakers have taken stabs at closing this gap.
One law by Assemblymember Steve Bennett, a Democrat from Oxnard, requires water providers in fire-prone parts of Ventura County to secure enough backup power or water to keep running for 24 hours. But Bennett’s attempt this year to require more detailed fire preparedness information from water suppliers statewide failed after substantial opposition from business groups and water agencies.
“I thought the reporting would give us the information that would help us have a well-informed, next-step policy. But instead, they didn’t want to reveal that information,” Bennett said.
Opponents feared the bill would “set a new and unrealistic standard on public water suppliers and would increase legal liability following a wildfire event,” and said another measure by state Sen. Anna Caballero was more practical, according to a bill analysis.
The Merced Democrat’s bill, still awaiting Newsom’s signature, requires larger urban water suppliers to add wildfire-specific procedures to their existing disaster preparedness plans. It also clarifies that dwindling supply and flagging pressure shouldn’t “be considered a substantial cause of the damages resulting from a wildfire.”
But the bill fails to reach smaller rural water agencies like many in Lake County. And it doesn’t pay for upgrades.
In fact, over and over, California lawmakers rejected — or, in one case, Newsom vetoed — bills that would have directed grants to water suppliers in places especially at risk for fire.
Cal Fire said state agencies do offer guidance and money. The Department of Water Resources said it’s funded a number of projects, including upgraded mainlines serving homes and fire hydrants on the Tuolumne Rancheria, with more funding opportunities coming.
But Pierce, of UCLA, was skeptical. “I get annoyed at this point because yeah, you can name some funding programs that you could theoretically get money from. But it won’t happen. So you need to do something different.”
Bennett’s own attempt to create a matching grant program to help rural water systems prepare for wildfire died in the Senate last fall despite overwhelming support from local governments and water suppliers. Bennett said he doesn’t know why.
Trade-offs
Retrofitting the systems that do exist poses its own problems. The tradeoffs include potentially dangerous decreases in water quality and increased costs for suppliers and their customers.
“There’s not enough money in the world that we could invest that would really enhance the system to allow 20 fire trucks at the same time to flow water. It’s cost prohibitive,” said Daryl L. Osby, former fire chief of the Los Angeles County Fire Department who is now a vice president of emergency preparedness for California Water Service, an investor-owned water utility.
Pierce’s research points to the state’s ongoing effort to impose wildfire standards on power utilities as a cautionary example, warning that mandates without funding attached tend to leave utilities and, ultimately their customers, holding costs and liability they can’t absorb.
Places with long histories of fire have charted their own course. After the 1906 earthquake and fire that followed, San Francisco built an emergency firefighting system capable of pumping from dedicated supplies and even from the San Francisco Bay.
Sapeta, in rural Lake County, doesn’t have Bay Area money.
“I have raked the leaves and there’s nothing that comes up,” Sapeta said. “I’m surprised that after (the Los Angeles fires), there aren’t any grant funds for a dry hydrant system or these portable pumps.”
Sapeta spent years looking for the right portable hydrants and money to buy them. Everything was either too difficult to move, too expensive, or both.
He eventually landed on the company, Remote Hydrants, and found a $75,000 grant through a local health system to purchase five. Another water supplier in the county bought two of their own, Sapeta said.
On a hot day at the end of August, he was finally ready to test them.
Just in time
The hills looked ready to burn as water companies and fire agencies gathered on the banks of Clear Lake. A picnic table lay covered in binders thick with Sapeta’s plans and procedures for disasters.
Everyone was there, mingling in their water company t-shirts and navy fire uniforms, to learn how to use the new remote hydrants.
“I’m pretty excited,” Sapeta said, waiting in the shade of a willow for the demonstration to start. “It’s been a long journey.”
Asked if he thought he’d see the hydrants in action this year, he said, “I guarantee we will.”
Next to him, Banks glanced at the hills and half-joked, “Maybe today.”
This story was made possible in part by support from The James Irvine Foundation.
